The Debt of Those Who Return / 12
11 · The Foundry That Listens
Part Two · What We Hold Up Together
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The Quarry Galleries were full of footwear.
Small boots, work sandals, split clogs: families had hung them from the beams to find their own during the evacuation. Dust had erased the colours. Beran passed beneath without touching any.
They found seventeen workers in a side chamber, locked in after refusing to keep drilling. One had died of cold. Teren stayed to tend the others while Serik and Maera guided those who could walk to the entrance. Not all wanted to leave their companion. Beran promised to come back and bring him out.
“Not him,” an old woman said. “The body.”
Her name was Hulda, and she had worked the mine before Beran received his first commission. She recognised him, though she pretended not to at first. Teren noticed how she avoided his face and thought it was resentment. When they were alone, she asked him to help her stand.
“I'd like to speak to him sitting somewhere else,” she said. “Here I look like a condemned woman asking a judge
for something.”
They took her to a step where no water ran. Hulda had testified against Beran. At the hearing she said the dwarf ordered galleries kept open after the alarm. That was true. The reason was missing: families were trapped in dwellings on a lower level, and the galleries were the only access.
“They told me that if I spoke about the neighbourhoods, they'd put my son on the list,” she explained. “That he signed the shifts. I kept quiet. Afterwards I thought that if they killed you, I wouldn't have to face you again.”
Beran crouched before her.
“My sister was down there.”
“I know.”
The dwarf rose. Teren prepared to restrain him, ashamed a moment later of having thought it. Beran went into the corridor. Hulda began taking off a ring with numb fingers.
“This isn't a trial,” the cleric told her.
“Everything is when you have less time left than shame.”
Beran returned with a drier blanket. He laid it over her knees.
“When you get
down, you testify,” he said.
Hulda nodded.
“I can't give you back…”
“I didn't ask you to.”
Teren waited until the dwarf could move away without falling. He followed him a few steps. Beran rested his forehead against a beam.
“I hate her,” he said before the cleric could speak. “I don't know whether telling the truth will make me stop. I don't want you explaining how to do it today.”
Teren leaned against the opposite beam. They listened to the water for a while. Then the dwarf went to find tools to cut the chains.
In the next chamber they found provisions confiscated from the workers. There were children's shoes, letters and small metal things useless on a building site. They had brought keepsakes, thinking they would stay a month. One man had carved a spoon each day: thirty-eight, all imperfect in a different way.
Neris counted them, then sought him among the freed workers. He told her he wanted to sell them. The gnome bought two. She did
not tell him he should keep them as testimony. No one was obliged to become a museum piece.
In the Silent Foundry, the extinguished furnaces still gave off heat. Ordan's workers had connected copper pipes to the old conduits. Meltwater came down from the snow, heated up and flowed out towards the river. That was why the silt beasts had changed territory. Why Bridgebasin's low gardens were flooded despite insufficient rain.
Ivara took notes, then tore a sheet when she discovered a figure.
“What is it?” Teren asked.
“I approved this formula. In a treatise on preserving memories. They requested a review from Dawnrock's hospice. They said it was to restore speech to the wounded.”
Beran studied the valves.
“The formula doesn't connect the pipes by itself.”
“I knew who was paying.”
The dwarf tightened a nut before replying.
“Then we'll have to write that down when we write the rest.”
Ivara nodded. To Teren, it seemed she had accepted a sentence and a relief at the same time.
The
blow sounded again at the rear of the foundry.
The creature emerged from a hopper: an armoured, blind animal with digging legs and ribs widened by old metal grafts. During the war of the Rupture, subterranean beasts had been used to breach fortifications. This one still wore a command ring embedded in its neck.
Elyen pulled Neris behind a boiler. The first charge broke a beam and raised a cloud of slag. Serik stood before Teren. His sword rebounded from the armour; the vibration split his hand.
Beran struck a conduit with his hammer three times. The creature turned its head.
“It follows the rhythm of work!” he shouted. “It can't see!”
Neris beat a different rhythm on the boiler. The animal charged her. As it passed beneath the conduit, Ivara cut the ring with a line of white fire. Flesh burned; the creature fell on its side and began kicking.
Beran tried to approach. Elyen stopped him.
The hunter finished it from a distance.
The creature died with the
sound of trapped water.
Elyen waited until its legs stopped moving. Then he approached the broken ring. Its lettering was badly worn: the name of a sappers' company and a number indicating the batch of animals. It had been bred to distinguish the blows of work and advance towards them. Underground, that order outlived everyone who knew how to give it.
Serik asked whether it might have been freed earlier.
The hunter lifted one end of the ring. Metal roots had entered the flesh decades ago. The beast was not old in human years: it belonged to a species that shed its armour slowly and could outlive the communities that tamed it. Without special tools, tearing out that command would have killed it all the same.
“I don't know whether there was another way,” he replied. “I'd like not to have to decide with a bow in my hand.”
Maera had cut a length of rope to bind Serik's wound. She looked at the hunter without speaking. She, too, could
not always discover how much of a threat was will and how much an old command driven deep.
Teren knelt beside the head. He had heard preachers divide the world's creatures into custodians and corruptions. This body did not know which category they would have given it. It had suffered, obeyed and tried to kill those who made noise.
He covered the blind eye with a cloth. Elyen neither thanked him nor stopped him.
Between the armour plates they found a sprouted seed. It had fallen there because the animal lay in warm mud and the cracks retained moisture. Ilyndra would have been one possible explanation; so were earth, water and time. The hunter left it in a corner where it could find light from an ancient lamp.
Then he returned to the arrows.
They had spent four. He recovered two whole. One lay broken beneath the creature, and the last had sunk between conduits they could not open. Serik offered some taken from the guards. Their balance was different.
Elyen tested them and accepted three.
Before they went on, Maera looked at the hopper from which the beast had emerged. There was more than one chamber beyond it.
They did not investigate the others. Knowing the world held a danger did not oblige them to exhaust it that same day. Afterwards, Elyen picked up the intact arrow and broke it. No one asked why.
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